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31 days/day 4

Leto doesn’t have a great number of myths and I would be tempted to say that the myth of the Lycian frogs is my favorite…and yet it comes a close second to a myth that illustrates the nature if the goddess.

There is a second Delphi myth regarding the serpent Python. I have noticed that Python is a title rather than a name and that we have two children of Ge who were destroyed and thus “rotted” by Apollon. Leto plays no observable role in the myth of the first Python Delphyne. Rather she is in part and parcel of the second python myth of a male python, son of Ge, who was represented as a man in combat during the Septeria at the same time as celebrating the myth of Delphyne. This son of Ge is most logically, as this Python is said to be one who attempted to molest Leto, the giant Tityos whose originating city was forbidden from participating in the rites at Delphi.

In this myth Leto is in the company of her children as she instructs A pollon to shoot shoot paean. Usually in this telling both twins slay the “serpent” and must seek purification….but Leto herself who instigates and instructs the unfolding of events is herself beyond the stain of murder. As such rather than the destroying force like her children are she can be more likened to the elemental source of this natural destructive power. Perhaps not unlike the fertile ground which both receives the rotting dead by necessity to bring forth from the fertile ground new life. Death necessitates the action of her domain and therefore us necessary to her own action.

It is not the last time Leto would command death to strike to a purpose., usually in a mythic narrative of insult but likely having more layers of meaning to the overreaching purpose of the death and the Dar reaching results that it plows the fertile ground for.